Dance with the Devil
by nsfweu
Summary: [Dragon Age LJ Kink Meme fill] In exchange for a favor, the Lavellan family barters their young daughter to a dark god. Twenty years later, that god comes to collect on their agreement. (Not advised to all readers. Appropriate content warnings will be placed at the head of each chapter.)
1. Prologue

PROLOGUE

((Author's note: Pretty sure most of ya'll thought I was a one-and-doner. Nope. Mari is back and better than ever with another DA:I kink meme fill. TW for BDSM, dub-con, etc., it's pretty rough to be honest ^^'' such is the life of a closet perv.  
ANYWAY! Hope ya'll enjoy, please send more prompts (the more specific the better!) my way, I must hone my smutting abilities. Reminder that I don't read the comments so if you've got feedback you gotta PM it to me!  
And final note: The Lavellan I'm using is never named but modeled after my own. If her look isn't your headcanon or cup a' tea… I guess you can find and replace your own adjectives hahaha ^^))

Outside, there is dim light; lantern-like and innocent. The camp is small and faintly glowing, a single ember in the dead fire pit of the forest; above, the ether seems to churn, wisps of thin, fog-like clouds misting through the starscape. The night breathes. It seems to swallow that which it cannot extinguish; it is searching and amiss.

Inside the aravel: a communion old as myth. The air appears like water, clear but thick, and rippled with faint filaments of green light. Like water, it is hard for the complainants to breathe.

They are nervous. By all accounts they should be. Communication with gods is an oft-fatal thing, and that's the case with the good ones. The diabolic figure, shadow of their pantheon, is another beast altogether. Specifically it is a wolf, and like a wolf it doesn't know fairness or mercy: it just knows desire. Fen'Harel knows what it wants and cares little about what others do.

"And you understand my help does not come free," the wolf says, low and predatory.

It is circling. Its eyes are void-white slits and its pelt is the green of the Fade or of afflicted storm magic; it ripples and distorts the heavy atmosphere, its voice both resonant and dim. It walks a special border. The two Dalish elves will swear till the day they die (_would_ swear—no one in their right minds would confess to consorting with the Dread Wolf) that they saw Him, before them, clear as day: but they will never rid themselves of that lingering impression of a hallucination or a fever dream. Dark conjuration, maybe.

"W-we know, Fen'Harel," murmurs the woman, trying to find a tone that is neither meek nor insolent. "We do not know what we have to offer, but we'll pay anything—anything! We just need our son back. He was so young. Too young."

"Your son will return to you," replies the god. "And in return—" the projection flicks its tail at the cradle where the couple's infant slept. "—you will give me the new thing."

The pair looks at each other, searching: there is no easy way to choose which child you will surrender to the maws of the abyss, but there is an abject criteria, elegant in its apex objectivity. The boy has been around longer. He can speak. Walk. He is an elf; a person. He is tangled in their lives. Their daughter is new; their love is unconditional but it is only now beginning to bud.

And their assessment has a footnote. Fen'Harel has no use for a dead baby girl. She will undeniably live, though to what end the two prefer not to ponder too long. They will have two living children. They will not have to worry over their daughter, who has already shown to be touched by the Fade, being detected by Templars; they can avoid human incursion.

When thought about like so, it is hard to deny that there is a right and a wrong choice. Or so they tell themselves.

The man speaks up as the pair's gaze is cut. "It's a deal."

The wolf grins. The effect is as intended.

A silent blinding burst of radiance; then the body on the table sits up.

"Mama?"

The couple falls into tears. To Fen'Harel it toes pathetic, but then again, most of mortal existence toes pathetic, or steps squarely into it. He pays them no mind as he pads over to the cradle where his new acquisition lies, peering once over the side at her vibrant-dark skin, and bright blonde shock of hair, while the hysterics of a reunited family continue brightly behind him.

Roused by the noise the child awakes. Her eyes, blue and pensive, meet his. She says nothing. Does nothing. Her face is blank and unafraid. He blinks once and then he is gone; slipping through the aravel as if it is nothing, and pacing away into the deep bottlebrush forest, leaving behind parents who will forget their deal with the demon for now; and tomorrow morning wonder why their sacrificial lamb remains.

They will wonder for twenty more years.


	2. Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

(TW for unreality and mind intrusion.)

(Slight warning, I'm actually super bad at understanding stuff like how the magic system works! So if I'm giving blatant misinformation, either replace it with the corrected version OR! assume Firstname Lavellan is just really clueless about where she's getting her magic from.

I also wanted to use concept art (dark skinned/dreadlocked) Solas but I wimped out. If any of ya'll want to see him at a later date in this fic or another please hit me up!)

Her steps were fleet through the hallowed plain. The wiry golden hair of the earth—the wild grasses that grew thick and indomitable in this season—whipped her bare thighs as she sprinted, feet confident and bare on the dry ground. It was a dry season, and hot as the north would see, and the world felt primed for adventure.

The elf's footfalls were light and buoyant as she pursued the intruders, the bow in her hand for show more than aggression. Ahead, her targets—both blonde, both male, one human and one dwarf—ducked through the forest, hell biting at their heels, the sound of disbelieving laughter seeming to ring from them. She drew her weapon and lobbed an arrow in the thick of a tree just aside their course. The action earned her a sharp yelp, and she smiled. Unlike her brother it took an extraordinarily bad day to get her to the frontlines of the informal war upon all shemlen. Most days she was content to badger them. Occasionally scare them shitless or steal their earthly possessions.

But now they were gone. From their discussion, the two had gotten themselves turned about and were on their third day of witless meandering. If anything she had done them a favor. Unless their destination was deep in the wildwood they had been saved from their share of uncivil encounters with all manner of forest dwellers.

She smiled and turned back towards their camp, her pace dawdling and unsteady, stepping heel in front of toe, insistently brushing each bloomed wildflower with fingertips, light as butterfly wings. Quietly humming to herself, she plucked a few at the peduncle, twining them into her thick blonde hair—she had always liked the effect of adorning herself with the wilds, but lacked the patience and dexterity to weave the flower crowns her father had tried to teach her how to make on more than one occasion.

The childhood she remembered and the one that had happened often argued. At some points they agreed—her parents _had_ always loved her. The softness in their eyes and worry in their words made this undeniable. But what she did not remember was the persistent discomfort. The confusion and fear—the occasional late night private conversations about what had _really_ happened the night her brother miraculously recovered from blackcough. There was the insinuation that the Dread Wolf himself had instilled himself in her that night. Fen'Harel, common knowledge stated, was a chronic oathbreaker. But neither the Lavellan family nor the clan's Keeper knew of a time in which the proverbial lord of self-interest had ever borne a miracle for free.

She remembered the love her parents had for her and her brother but not that she had always been handled gently, as if she were a stranger or a sleeping bear—when questions, reflective and speculative, bubbled up in her minds she could answer them with a blunt and irrefutable answer—she was a mage, and magic, while useful, was ample cause for fear in the hands of a wild child.

The Lavellan girl veered past the camp, her feet finding the path she had taken on her familiar detour; down to the hollow she had yet kept secret. The stone tunnel seemed to sing of past wanderers, bare elven feet, past twins of hers, traversing the darkness into the oasis that followed. There was something comforting in those absent ghosts, something that made her lifestyle seem a longstanding stone, a paragon of preservation, and not the deviant eccentricity she knew the shems viewed it as.

The spring was ambient, loud in a way that inspires sleep more than aggravation. A waterfall passed from the forested hill above into the river below without reserve, rupturing the pool's service in a cloud, half-crystalline, half-foam. She crept to the edge of the water, her bare feet, hardened nearly to hooves on their soles, sweeping lazy bows into the lively green grass. She sat down, excusing the wetness of the ground as she slumped backwards, back, shoulders, then head landing gently on the ambivalent grass, which bowed to accept her weight.

Clouds passed overhead, obscured by the thick canopy that rendered the spring hollow in a perpetual state of timelessness and shade. Only thin abstractions of white and blue alerted her that the world outside continued to exist. It was a nice development. Birdsong a more potent lullaby than any she'd heard sung, she began to drift off in a foggy, noncommittal way. For a while she walked the line between presence and absence, her ears falling deaf and her senses slipping away piece by piece till she was lucid in her own mind and to the world, dead.

She was young but older than she had expected to be. Each generation, the quickening claimed its years, or so her clan had always lamented. The Lavellan girl liked her life as it was—free, wild, inlaid just-so with tradition that it was rich and unpretentious—but yet something gnawed at her, insistent and slow, that she was missing something. That _they, _the Dalish as a whole, were missing something.

_You're certainly right about that, da'len. _

The voice in her mind was obtrusive and jarring but smooth. Comfortable. A stranger in her home who had already taken the place for his—she forced her eyes open and her body twitched in fear only to find herself in incorrigible darkness. At first she whimpered and willed herself to shrink inwards, her heart racing and her mind struggling to keep up with the guttural impulses coursing through her. Relaxation erupted through her body when she realized it was but a dream. She let out a sigh, long and winding, watched her smoke-like breath curl in the darkness.

But the voice persisted without a body; it lacked the acoustic resonance of a speaker in a cave—it was ever present. It was deeper: within her mind. Like a thought armed with a voice of its own.

_Tell me, who am I?  
_

Rarely did she find herself particularly compelled to answer a voice in a dream; instead she took to wiggling feeling into her fingers, then her palms, then her wrists, until she was able to push herself up to a sitting position and stare into the featureless void, finding it just as empty as before. She sighed. While she was here, an apathetic prisoner of the Fade, she might's well entertain herself.

"A demon, in all likelihood," she said, the words dripping off her tongue in bored exasperation. "I hate to burst your bubble, my friend, but my soul is already spoken for. Traded it to one of your buddies in exchange for a nap a few days back."

Laughter filled her mind; this time it did sound cavernous.

_Do not insult me, da'asha. You know who I am._

"No…?" offered the girl, raising an eyebrow. "Sorry. Don't make it a habit to get chummy with disembodied voices."

_Allow me to refresh your memory, then—_and then her mind was filled; intrusive thoughts and images churning through her; a collage or a tapestry, star-specked, ripe: she could pick out the moon, the Black City of the Fade, the two wolf statues that studded her campsite like guards, the faint but ever present memory of the two white canine eyes boring into hers some decades ago. She gasped, drawing the heavy air deeply into her lungs.

"Fen'Harel," she murmured. Of concrete evidence she was sorely deprived; but the impressions forced upon her had been vivid, primordial and sang pointedly of the monstrous antigod who's treachery had been imparted upon her since childhood; and anyway, the words escaped her mouth before she truly knew what she was saying. Or what she was implying—she was talking to a god.

There is a twofold sacrosanctity two dreams for a Dalish mage. The Beyond is ripe with spirit and spirits; it hosts the infernal Eternal City. It is where somewhere the gods lie in bondage. It is the font from which the mage draws their being; and it is only known in dreams and in spellcraft. There is a certain level of esteem and trust and seriousness assigned to the dreaming state that other cultures do not honor. Only mild licks of doubt sparked to dissuade her star struck fear of her conversation partner.

_Then you do know me, _the voice said, mired in satisfaction. _Though I will lament, not as well as I know you._

She swallowed hard, suddenly self-conscious. The passive omniscience of gods can usually be ignored, though far less so when they engage one in conversation.

The voice continued without waiting for any response, though she knew not what she would have said.

_I know you well enough to know that your poor, dear parents have kept you firmly under bit and blindfold for the past twenty years,_ Fen'Harel said. _I know you well enough that it is not just an assumption of mine that you've not a conception of why I'm speaking to you._

"You're not wrong," she replied in a tentative, shaking voice; hoping beyond hope that the reason the Root of All Evil was speaking to her was because he was bored or because he was wondering which tunic he should wear to his formal "Fuck the Gods" dinner and wanted her opinion.

_I see no reason to prolong the matter. _Fen'Harel's voice echoed in her head; the sensation was odd and foreign in her cranium, culminating in a pulsating hyper-awareness that made her want to scream. She indeed hoped he would get on with his business here; she was ready to wake up and not sleep again for a fortnight.

_ When I fetched your brother's soul from the Fade a few years ago, I did not do it out of the kindness of my heart, _the god said. _Your parents signed their dear infant daughter to the jaws of the Dread Wolf for the life of their son. An oath with a god is not easily broken, da'len. As the agreement dictates, you are now my property._

Too stunned to move or respond, and feeling her mouth go dry, the Lavellan girl's body went cold, a potent chill running from neck to tailbone. He was lying, of course. To the god of trickery and deception and malefaction a lie came more freely than honesty, didn't it? Regardless, her heart kicked with adrenaline and her heart beat violently in her ears though with every neuron she compelled him to be weaving some elaborate trick.

_You will be now living with me, under my rules for the foreseeable future. It is as was agreed upon, and your parents' obligations will thus be fulfilled. If you wish to blame me for your slighting, I will not take offense, though it was not I who sold my living child for my dead one. _

"You're lying."

"Unfortunately, I am not," the voice was suddenly behind her—she started and let out a sharp hiss of surprise as she realized she was no longer alone with her—albeit intrusive—thoughts. She stood up and whipped around instinctively, reaching thoughtlessly to the belt where her on-call dagger did no longer lie.

He was heads taller than her, she realized after nearly nose-diving into his chest, dressed in fur and linen; his face pale and austere with narrow eyes and an expression bordering smug. Undeniably he was attractive, in a foreign, ageless sort of manner, and possessed an aura of regal charisma—but the sight of him made her shudder, her skin feel feverish and prickled.

Fen'Harel looked down at her and she at first attempt to parry his gaze, her pale eyes reaching his and holding; but without warning, the lived impression of the wolf's leer over her crib side burned in her mind and the predatory watch was, past and present, one in the same. With a throbbing head she looked down to where her feet broke the expanse of paramount blackness, her mind aching with questions she had to force her lips not to ask.

"This is all just a dream," she murmured to herself, her voice warbled with the promise of tears, her fists clenching tightly in her palms, jagged nails cutting red lines as she tried to will her vision away; everything persisted. "It's just a dream, it's just a dream," she repeated cyclically in her mind as despair wrenched in her mind.

"That it is, da'len," Fen'Harel replied, a smile, distinct and predatory, forming in the corners of his mouth as he firmly locked a hand around the back of her neck like a half-collar, compelling her gaze back to him. "Though I doubt you will find that so comforting when you—

"Wake up."

With that her eyes snapped open and she launched herself forward onto her palms, panting and afraid. Her pulse was not hampered when the telltale feel of grass was absent under her hot palms nor when her saught familiar vista was replaced by a mosaic stone wall.

(Fact: OP said Anders/Varric randomly showing up was a turn off. Fact: I'm sorry. I did it anyway.  
Fact: This is one of those chapters I wrote 100% while inebriated 100% after 2AM. I hope to god it made sense. If not… I'll rewrite it ^^'')


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